International interest and participation is growing rapidly in what will be the most important gathering of activists to discuss socialist solutions to capitalism's crisis in Australia this year.
Entitled "World at a Crossroads: Fighting for Socialism in the 21st Century", the conference will house discussions on some of the pressing issues facing humanity, bringing together activists from four continents and more than a dozen countries.
Hosted by the Democratic Socialist Perspective, an affiliate of the Socialist Alliance, and Resistance, and sponsored by Green Left Weekly, the conference will be held over the Easter weekend, April 10-12, at Sydney Girls High, Surry Hills.
The conference will focus on five central themes; the international economic crisis; the Latin American revolution and emerging alternatives to capitalism; global warming and human survival; resisting imperialism and war; and strategies for building mass movements, left unity, and anti-capitalist parties.
The list of confirmed international guest speakers has expanded. The conference will now include:
Reihana Mohideen (Philippines) — Mohideen is a long-time activist in the women's and labour movements in the Philippines. She is the chairperson of Transform Asia, a gender and labour institute in South East Asia and is a member of the international department of the Party of the Labouring Masses.
Mohideen is also the editor of Socialist Dialogue, a bulletin that carries debates and discussions of the international socialist movement
Kavita Krishnan (India) — Krishnan is a leader of India's radical student movement and was president of the All India Students' Association from 1999 to 2006.
Currently she is the national secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association and serves as a Central Committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Krishnan is also the editor of the party's Marxist magazine Liberation.
Nelson Davila (Venezuela) — Davila is a veteran Venezuelan revolutionary and was a founding member of Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement.
He was a member of the ideological commission of the Maisanto Command, the coordinating body for the mass campaign to defeat the opposition's attempts to recall Chavez in the August 2004 referendum. Currently, he is the head of Venezuela's diplomatic mission to Australia.
Other confirmed speakers include: Roger Annis from Socialist Voice and Haiti Solidarity in Canada; Daphne Lawless from Socialist Worker New Zealand; Tomas Freitas from Luta Hamutuk in East Timor; and representatives from the People's Democratic Party in Indonesia, the Socialist Party of Malaysia, and the Labour Party Pakistan.
They will join Michael Lebowitz, a Marxist economist based at the Centro Internacional Miranda in Venezuela; Luis Bilbao, a veteran of the Latin American left and a participant in the construction of the mass-based United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV); and Ian Angus, co-founder of the Ecosocialist International Network.
More international expressions of interest are being received regularly. For those interested in ideas to change the world this conference is one that is not to be missed.
[For more information or to register for the conference visit http://www.worldatacrossroads.org, email dsp@dsp.org.au or phone + 61 2 9690 1977.]